As requested I've moved this conversation into this thread.
Hi there rcrsn51,
Downloaded hplip_scan-3.12.10a.pet this morning - then had to go out in support of my elderly father. Have now had a chance to test it, my printer still prints but the hp icon which was showing on the right in the tool bar which was how I was managing the printer has now moved into Menu>Utility> as HP Device Manager. When I click on it to test the scanner a screen comes up for a split second then disappears before I can either read it or do anything with it. Haven't been able to test the scanner yet.

rcrsn51,
Further to my last - I have further investigated and found Graphics>Xsane Image Scanner. This works and have now been able to scan an image.
I dont think we need pursue this any further, altho it would be nice to have the HP Device Manager icon available in the tool bar so that selecting scan is made easier. Is this possible

You know what they say - if in doubt shoot for the stars!! This would be the icecream on top.

What an interesting effect! Usually, when duplexing is wrong, it's because one side is inverted. But in your case, it also appears to be the mirror image.

I have one suggestion. Precise is still using a very old version of Ghostscript, which does the rendering. I would try Slacko instead.

[Edit] I looked at this some more, and I think that I understand the problem.

My HP Deskjet F4280 does NOT do auto-duplexing. But I went into CUPS and turned on the duplexing features as you did, using Long Edge Standard.

In Abiword, I can print a two-page document two ways.
a. With the usual single pass.
b. With two passes - odd pages first, then even pages. In between, I spin the paper horizontally so the top edge is going back into the printer.

Slacko 5.5 has the new Ghostscript. With method (a), I get two sheets of paper, printed correctly. With method (b) I get one sheet, also correct.

But Precise 5.5 still has the old Ghostscript. With method (a), I get the weird mirror image effect on the second page. Method (b) prints correctly.

So I updated Precise to the new Ghostscript. Now both methods print correctly.

So I suspect that your solution with real auto-duplexing is to update Ghostscript in Precise. Please report back.

First of all, I tried printing using the two-sided-short-edge option and that works fine. (Flip the printed page over on the short edge and the result is what one expects.)

Secondly, I carried out your suggestion of using the Slacko 5.5 Ghostscript package, bearing in mind that I am using Precise 5.4.2.

I started with a fresh copy of Precise (booted with puppy pfix=ram). The version of ghostscript installed is 8.15.4. I downloaded package ghostscript-9.05-s14.pet and it failed to install.

(There is a package ghostscript-8.64-s.pet, but I presumed that version may be earlier than the original - thinking that it was 8.6.4. I get a bit confused sometimes with the different version numbering!!)

I did a bit of investigating, and found in the /tmp directory a file petget_missing_dbentries-Packages-alien. The contents: ghostscript-9.05-s14|ghostscript|9.05-s14|||||ghostscript-9.05-s14.pet|||.

Am I correct in understanding that I cannot install a 'slackware' built .pet package in Precise?